Recent Entries from Mike Blockstein and Reanne EstradaMovable Type Pro 4.382013-05-28T01:00:00Zhttp://www.kcet.org/user/profile/pviles/feed/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=posts&username=mikeblocksteinProyecto MercadoFRESCO: Enlightenment & a Giant Tacotag:www.kcet.org,2013:/arts/artbound//1834.598592013-05-28T08:00:00Z2013-05-30T19:22:20ZProyecto MercadoFRESCO is trying to shift the cultural perception of the corner store from public health blight to community resource. Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estradahttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=15946Public Matters' Market Makeover is a comprehensive strategy for addressing the "grocery gap" in "food deserts," areas that have limited access to quality, healthy food; an overabundance of fast food; and alarmingly high rates of chronic conditions related to poor diet.

Dark.
Dirty.
Dilapidated.

The words rattled off. A description of a horror movie? Not exactly. Making its first visit to Yash La Casa Market, our class of high school students from the East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy (ELARA) at Esteban Torres High School was doing a simple observational exercise: pick three words to describe the market. Yash was cluttered. Its walls a drab gray, windows covered with bars. Ads for beer, chips, and energy drinks plastered the store inside and out. Greeting you at the entrance was the ubiquitous "wall of chips," a display rack offered for "free" by a global food and beverage company in return for its prominent placement. The students' words rang clear: We don't want to be here, let alone shop here. Yash oozed that corner store aura: Buy and leave.

Repeat this exercise at virtually any corner store and you'd get similar results. Therein lies the complexity and challenge of Proyecto MercadoFRESCO. We aren't just making physical changes to a corner store like Yash; we're trying to shift the cultural perception of the corner store from public health blight to community resource.

Proyecto MercadoFRESCO is a multi-year, multi-pronged approach to improve cardiovascular health in East L.A. and Boyle Heights. It's a project of the UCLA-USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities (CPHHD), funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. Public Matters is responsible for engaging youth and community members in the transformation of local corner stores and the promotion of healthy behaviors (eat more fruits and veggies, please) that support the stores and their transition to healthy food retail.

Sound simple?

Think again.

It's Friday and school just let out. Identical scenes play at our two partner high schools, ELARA and the School of Communications, New Media and Technology (CNMT) at Roosevelt High School. A flood of teenage bodies exits the gate and coalesces into familiar trajectories; they stream towards Jack's or one of the many fast food places surrounding campus, towards the local raspado places or one of the numerous corner stores for a slushy, a soda, Flaming Hots. Street vendors beckon: candy, chicharrones. Ice cream trucks circle, siren songs blaring. You can trip over all manner of junk food as you navigate the East Los Angeles or Boyle Heights food landscape, but fresh healthy options are few and far between. Food environment shapes behavior; an unhealthy diet develops accordingly: it's what's available, accessible and acceptable. It's the diet with which the students have grown up and to which they are increasingly addicted.

Proyecto MercadoFRESCO seeks to change behaviors and improve health outcomes. The solution begins with education. For the past three years, Public Matters has taught classes at ELARA and CNMT around Proyecto MercadoFRESCO, training high school students to become community health leaders and advocates. Proyecto MercadoFRESCO primes students to become agents of social change who transform their food environments in concrete, tangible ways and advocate on behalf of the healthy changes they implement. Learning is hands-on, both in the classroom and out in the community. We cover five main topics:

Food Access as a Social Justice Issue

Media Production

Healthy Eating and Nutrition

Media Literacy

Social Marketing

It's a typical day in Mr. Buchman's class at ELARA. Students are physically present, yet dreaming of other things. Omar is chewing so voraciously on his pencil that it breaks in half. Jocelyn is at her desk devouring a burger in one hand, a taco in the other. The class becomes twitchy, agitated, and unable to focus on Mr. Buchman's lesson. To the class, Mr. Buchman's blue flannel shirt looks suspiciously like a taco. In fact, Mr. Buchman is a giant taco. They're all fiending: two tacos for 99 cents at Smack's. When the bell rings, the entire class stampedes. In the corner, an NPR reporter watches for a possible story on food deserts.

Welcome to media production at ELARA. The class is shooting scenes for "Have You Noticed How Much Fast Food We Eat?," a video based on the aforementioned Friday after-school trek to Jack's. Eventually, the finished piece will screen at summer outdoor movie nights, numerous community presentations, and on LA Metro buses. From this day on, the class will know their teacher as "Taco Buchman."

Part of "Have You Noticed?" an video series exploring of the East L.A. food landscape by the ELARA students. In this episode, fueled by their fast food cravings, the students experience some strange daydreams during class. Mayhem ensues.

The goal of Proyecto MercadoFRESCO's education and curriculum is to make learning fun, participatory and to extend what happens in the classroom into the community. Media production is a method of critical inquiry and creative commentary, enabling the students to examine and explore their environment. It allowed us to talk about diet, nutrition, advertising, why East L.A. is populated with numerous fast food options and so few healthy ones - and why this is a social justice issue. Before we met them, none of the students had ever heard of the term "food desert." Yet all of them were intimately familiar with its consequences. Just ask how many of them know someone who is obese, overweight or has diabetes (answer: everyone). Where you live, how much money you make, and your race determines your health outcomes. They and their families are at a distinct disadvantage. Proyecto MercadoFRESCO enables the students to address these health disparities.

Proyecto MercadoFRESCO is also about leadership development. Leadership development is about opportunities. Soon, the students will be in front of an audience of parents and community members talking about food deserts, performing skits they've developed about healthy eating and nutrition, and screening their videos.

It's a blistering East L.A. summer day - upper 90's. The ELARA class has matriculated from "students" to "Proyecto MercadoFRESCO interns." They are in the backyard of Yash La Casa Market. Using nothing more than hand tools (pick axes, bars, sledgehammers), they are breaking up Yash's giant concrete slab, which will find new life as a garden. The students may be hot, sweaty and perhaps a bit grumpy from the hard work, but they are also exhilarated. This is no longer a study or class project about food deserts or healthy eating and nutrition; it's a chance for them to transform their neighborhood. Learning has been turned into action.

Within a few months, the words to describe Yash are completely different. "Colorful." "Tasty." "Healthy." "My Store." They roll off the students' tongues. Customers agree. Yash's exterior is now bright green. Beer, soda and cigarette posters have been replaced with large glass windows. The bars are gone. Inside, beer posters featuring scantily clad lady-flesh have disappeared, as have ads for beer, chips, and energy drinks. The formerly paltry produce items have been replaced with a shiny, fully stocked produce case, visible from those big new windows. The "wall of chips" has been moved to the back. Yash now projects, "Welcome: come and stay." Mothers, the primary shoppers of fruits and vegetables, feel more comfortable bringing their kids into the store and shopping for the family.

Soon the same scenario will be repeated at Ramirez Meat Market, the second Proyecto MercadoFRESCO East L.A. store. In a few months, two more stores in Boyle Heights will undergo the same treatment, led by a mix of students and alumni from ELARA and CNMT. They will have progressed again, this time from "interns" to "community liaisons." They will be paid staff of the project and of Public Matters, tasked with the challenge of transforming markets, behaviors and health outcomes. The physical transformation of the markets is just another step in the Market Makeover process. To ensure the sustainability of healthy food retail in East L.A. and Boyle Heights, the community liaisons will be responsible for promoting the stores and their healthy inventory.

It's fall of Proyecto MercadoFRESCO's third year. Students from Mr. Lopez's Food Justice class at CNMT meet on a Saturday morning with the community liaisons and a Public Matters crew. They are on their way to promote the MercadoFRESCO markets' new healthy inventory at the East L.A. Mexican Independence Day Parade. Some students are dressed in bright orange Proyecto MercadoFRESCO t-shirts, freshly silkscreened in Mr. Lopez's classroom. Others are dressed in giant fruit and vegetable costumes, courtesy of artist Amy Howden-Chapman and the ELARA students who created the costumes the previous year. The group walks on the sidewalk, passing out flyers along the parade route. Within an hour, buoyed by the enthusiastic response of thousands of parade watchers, they are unofficially walking down the middle of the street in the parade. People cheer them on.

Proyecto MercadoFRESCO is ultimately a process of transformation-- of young people into neighborhood leaders; of local markets from health blight into community resources; of neighborhoods plagued by poor health outcomes into healthy places. Changing food behaviors and improving a neighborhood's health outcomes will take a generation, maybe more. It will take policy changes, multi-pronged efforts and tremendous investment. Transforming the food landscape is serious business, but there's no reason it can't be fun. And it's bound to be more effective when a group of local teens is leading the parade.

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Top Image: Innovative classes at two high schools, the development of young community health leaders, social marketing campaigns and the transformation of two corner stores in East L.A. are among the outcomes of Proyecto MercadoFRESCO. A multi-year, multi-pronged approach to improve cardiovascular health in East L.A. and Boyle Heights, Proyecto MercadoFRESCO is a project of the UCLA-USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities (CPHHD), funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

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Market Makeovers: Public Matters, Place, and Pedagogytag:www.kcet.org,2012:/arts/artbound//1834.577962013-03-27T08:00:00Z2013-05-30T19:23:05ZPublic Matters' Market Makeovers green the food desert -- one corner store at a time. Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estradahttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=15946Public Matters' Market Makeover is a comprehensive strategy for addressing the "grocery gap" in "food deserts," areas that have limited access to quality, healthy food; an overabundance of fast food; and alarmingly high rates of chronic conditions related to poor diet.

The school auditorium floor is cold. Teenage bodies lay flat, struggling not to move. A few giggles escape. Thirty feet up on the catwalk, a boy rolls the video camera. Below, a couple of girls position the bodies into letters that spell out the words, one at a time: HAVE. YOU. NOTICED?

It's only the second day of class and already the group is filming the title sequence to what will be a series of videos about the East Los Angeles Food Landscape. These videos will screen at summer outdoor movie nights, in community health meetings, at national food activism conferences, on L.A. Metro buses. But this day in 2010, at the start of their work with Market Makeovers, Mr. Buchman's class at the East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy (ELARA) at Esteban Torres High School is focused on making people letters, introducing the very serious issue of healthy food access in a playful, unexpected way. In the process, they're learning how to work together.

This is how Public Matters rolls. Encouraging creative mischief in the service of public benefit. Pushing collaboration. Sharing ownership of process and product. Playing well with others. Not exactly your typical for-profit business.

You might say that in spirit, Public Matters is "a non-profit in for-profit clothing." A rag-tag group of artists, media professionals and educators, codified as "consultants," Public Matters is a social enterprise that builds creative and social capital in communities. As a for-profit business, Public Matters designs and implements neighborhood-based new media, education and civic engagement projects for social change. It cultivates cross-sector partnerships between grass-roots organizations, academic institutions, neighborhood residents, youth and local municipalities. It builds relationships and develops future leaders. At the core of Public Matters' practice is a sense of place. Its projects strive to nourish and deepen a sense of place in its participants, to instill in them a greater ownership over the places they live and work and recognition that they themselves can shape the future of their neighborhoods for the better. A sense of place breeds belonging, purpose and responsibility; it makes meaningful community transformation possible.

Within an art world context, Public Matters is a bit of an anomaly. Its work sits in the category of "social practice" though it's been around longer than the term itself. Its project timelines favor deep, long-term engagement over ephemeral interventions, with work measured in years, not months. All its clients and partners exist outside the art world, as do its audience and the goals of its work. In the case of Market Makeovers, which seeks to increase access to healthy food in grocery-poor neighborhoods, Public Matters' goals are rooted in education, community transformation and public health. Although it doesn't use aesthetics as a primary barometer of success, aesthetics are deeply embedded into the work itself; visual strategies drive the work and effect change. Woefully, artists are underutilized resources for social change; creativity an undervalued strategy for systemic transformation. By infiltrating fields outside the art world, Public Matters hopes to make these arenas more receptive to creativity.

Public Matters has been doing Market Makeovers since 2007, greening the food desert -- one corner store at a time. Market Makeovers (a. k. a. "corner store conversions" in public health circles) address the "grocery gap" in "food deserts," areas that have limited access to quality, healthy food; an overabundance of fast food; and alarmingly high rates of chronic conditions related to poor diet (diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease). Typical corner store conversions involve the physical transformation of existing stores, the addition of healthier inventory (usually fresh fruits and vegetables), and some marketing of the new items. Shortly thereafter, the stores are left to their own devices. Unfortunately, just because you stock doesn't guarantee that customers will buy. It's not just about supply; you also have to make sure you create demand.

As an intervention strategy, Market Makeovers are another order of magnitude altogether, expanding way beyond corner store conversions. Comprehensive and long-term, they call for direct community participation and relationship building and aim for nothing short of community transformation. They encompass education and community engagement; business training for storeowners/operators; store transformation; and social marketing to change health behaviors and increase fresh fruit and vegetable consumption. With Market Makeovers, local youth and residents play a central role in the hands-on work of transforming markets and educating the community about the benefits of fruits and vegetables. They implement the solution, and in so doing take ownership of it.

They're ambitious undertakings, with lots of moving parts. You can check out past Market Makeovers in South L.A. with the Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) Initiative at www.marketmakeovers.org. For the past three years, Public Matters has been doing Market Makeovers in East L.A. and Boyle Heights through Proyecto MercadoFRESCO, a project of UCLA-USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities (CPHHD). Proyecto MercadoFRESCO has transformed two markets in East L.A. so far, with two in Boyle Heights forthcoming.

Over the next few weeks, our Artbound posts will focus primarily on these Makeovers, providing a behind-the-scenes look at process and evolution, community building and education in action. You'll explore the Boyle Heights Food Landscape and the challenges (behavior, health outcomes) it poses to its inhabitants. You'll meet the local young people who are evolving into community health leaders: students from the School of Communications, New Media + Technology (CNMT) at Roosevelt High School enrolled in a class designed around the project; alumni and a current student of the East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy (ELARA) at Esteban Torres High School who serve as MercadoFRESCO Community Liaisons. You'll see the stores before, during and after; meet the storeowners who've signed up for the risky proposition of selling fresh produce; learn how (or if) they build capacity for viable healthy food retail. You'll follow the Makeovers past the Grand Re-Openings to see youth-led efforts to ensure project sustainability when it counts the most: after the fanfare dies down.

Market Makeovers is an experiment in public engagement that plays out in real life - with actual people, challenges, and consequences. It comes with the imperfections and unruliness of personalities, institutions and relationships. It plays atop layers of history, against the backdrop of conflicting agendas (private profit vs. public benefit) and community baggage. It's fertile territory.

We hope that the specific example of the MercadoFRESCO Market Makeovers in Boyle Heights will serve as a springboard to explore broader ideas: the capacity of art and creative practice to impact complex, long-standing issues; place-based work; standards and aesthetics; working outside one's discipline and comfort zone; pedagogy and leadership development. To this end, our collaboration with Artbound will present posts from multiple perspectives and different voices, from participating youth, academic scholars, community developers, urban planners and educators. Topics may include the ethics of place; the history and context of the corner store; the role of media in community development; participatory and post-colonial pedagogy.

It is important, after all, to play well with others.

Dig this story? Vote by hitting the Facebook like button above and tweet it out, and it could be turned into a short video documentary. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook and Twitter.

Top Image: High School Students from the East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy learning video production.